Book Review: That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud's Female Homosexual Revisited. Ronnie C....
Sand, Shara; Simoni, Jane
2004-10-03 00:00:00
P1: GDP/GDW/GGN P2: GDW Sex Roles [sers] PP201-342142 June 24, 2001 13:34 Style ﬁle version Nov. 19th, 1999 Sex Roles, Vol. 44, Nos. 5/6, 2001 Book Review That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited. Ronnie C. Lesser & Erica Schoenberg (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 1999, 265 pp., $18.99 (paperback). In their edited volume, That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited, Lesser and Schoenberg have unearthed an “obscure article about desire,” compiling various reactions to one of the few cases of female homosexuality in Freud’s oeuvre. Lesser’s introduction sets the historical stage by describing Freud’s Vienna, anti-Semitism, and his out- sider status as a Jew. Freud’s status as a Jewish man is seen as essential to conscious and unconscious attitudes toward gender and sexuality. His 1920 paper, “The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman,” opens the volume. A section devoted to critiques of Freud’s paper by academic scholars from the social sciences and humanities comes next, followed by numerous psychoanalytic writings and a closing discussion. The collected papers all respond to a question that deLauretis poses in quoting Freud, “‘She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father
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Abstract

P1: GDP/GDW/GGN P2: GDW Sex Roles [sers] PP201-342142 June 24, 2001 13:34 Style ﬁle version Nov. 19th, 1999 Sex Roles, Vol. 44, Nos. 5/6, 2001 Book Review That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited. Ronnie C. Lesser & Erica Schoenberg (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 1999, 265 pp., $18.99 (paperback). In their edited volume, That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited, Lesser and Schoenberg have unearthed an “obscure article about desire,” compiling various reactions to one of the few cases of female homosexuality in Freud’s oeuvre. Lesser’s introduction sets the historical stage by describing Freud’s Vienna, anti-Semitism, and his out- sider status as a Jew. Freud’s status as a Jewish man is seen as essential to conscious and unconscious attitudes toward gender and sexuality. His 1920 paper, “The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman,” opens the volume. A section devoted to critiques of Freud’s paper by academic scholars from the social sciences and humanities comes next, followed by numerous psychoanalytic writings and a closing discussion. The collected papers all respond to a question that deLauretis poses in quoting Freud, “‘She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father